Throughout its 70 year history has been at the forefront of London’s music scene from jazz, to punk rock and the famous northern soul all-nighters. It has also been the venue of choice for huge bands to play secret gigs from the White Stripes to the Rolling Stones.

It is extremely sad that the 100 Club is under threat and is facing closure. I completely support the campaign to stop it closing. I am sorry that I can not be with you tonight for this press-launch. The threat of to the 100 Club and other music venues across London is why I have drawn up proposals to protect such venues through planning law. Aside from providing Londoners with many a great night out they also play an immensely important role in the UK’s economy and to a music business that is in danger of being sacrificed to short term commercial interests. …

Statement from Janice Long 01.11.10

We are renowned the world over for our music and yet we have no respect for the venues that have launched many a bands careers and have provided memorable nights for music lovers. The 100 Club is a piece of individuality in a street which is a succession of the same old fashion and coffee shops. I will never forget seeing Suede there for the first time. I want my 13 year old daughter to go there in the future, soak up the atmosphere and see some great bands.

Statement from Glen Matlock (Sex Pistols) 23.09.10

They very kindly let the Pistols do a residency there. The first time we played, there was 6 to 10 people, but by the end of the residency you had to queue around the block to get in. It established the band as the forefront punk band and the place was crowded out.

The free improvising pianist Irene Schweizer, born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland in 1941, grew into jazz by listening as a child to the dance bands in her father’s restaurant: here.

A hundred thousand working people are set to kick off a one-day strike in the Czech Republic tomorrow against the “anti-social” coalition government’s plans to cut public-sector pay by 10 per cent: here.

The fragile government of Italy’s prime minister Silvio Berlusconi suffered another significant blow as students poured onto the streets over the past two weeks to protest against proposed education reforms: here.

Since November 24, students have organized several mass protests in most Italian cities. The political establishment, meanwhile, is seeking new forms for a renewed attack on public education: here.

A HUNDRED thousand people marched through Rome on Saturday to press Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to step down, days before the billionaire media mogul faces a no-confidence vote in parliament: here.

Former Israeli soldiers who have testified against army abuses have for the first time given up their anonymity, to make their voices all the harder to ignore. Donald Macintyre gets an exclusive preview of a powerful new book: here.

JERUSALEM — Former President Moshe Katsav was convicted Thursday of raping an employee when he was a Cabinet minister, the most serious criminal charges ever brought against a high-ranking official in Israel and a case that shocked the nation: here.

HOUSTON — Orchard owner Leonard Baca had been watching his pecan trees slowly die for 12 years when he went into a washroom, put a gun in this mouth and killed himself.

The frustrated 73-year-old had spent thousands of dollars on technology and improvements to try to resolve the problem at his Central Texas ranch without ever learning what was killing the trees that had supported three generations of his family. Now, 18 years after his death, Baca’s son-in-law, Harvey Hayek, believes he’s solved the mystery: Sulfur dioxide pollution from a nearby coal-fired power plant has slowly killed two-thirds of his family’s 250-acre pecan orchard.

On Monday, Hayek and other pecan growers held a news conference in Austin to demand compensation from the Lower Colorado River Authority, which operates the plant, and the city. They also want research done on what and how much pollution is being emitted now and how much will be discharged after the plant installs equipment aimed at reducing emissions of sulfur dioxide, a component of acid rain.

“I’ve got several little 2-year-old grandkids and my own kids,” said Hayek, who joined the family business in 1969 after marrying Baca’s daughter, Carol. “If this wouldn’t have happened, they could all have been enjoying the pecans. They could have had a family business and continued it on for who knows how many years. It’s all been taken away from us.”

Drilling company Transocean had an incident on one of its North Sea rigs similar to the problem which caused the biggest oil spill in US history earlier this year, it was revealed today: here.

Like this:

This is a video of a pale-bellied brent goose on the Dutch coast, with a “normal” brent goose, a turnstone, and a few oystercatchers. The video is from 23 December 2009, Ter Heijde (Westland local authority).

During the recent relatively severe winters, strikingly many pale-bellied brent geese were observed in our country. In total over 500. The first signs of a new influx are already there, as evidenced by the observation of a ringed pale-bellied brent goose on the beach of Westland (Zuid-Holland province); that bird is by now almost 21 years old.

Pale-bellied brent geese are no longer considered to be a subspecies of the more well known brent goose; they are considered to be a real species in their own right.

The Westland ringed bird had been seen before in the Netherlands last winter, and in the 1990s.

A drawing on the politics of embarrassment. At the time of writing, large scale digital denial of service attacks, perhaps organised by the Americans, are attempting to restrict the ability of the Wikileaks organisation to publish the leaked material.

The new species of giant stork, named Leptoptilos robustus, stood 1.8m tall and weighed up to 16kg researchers estimate, making it taller and much heavier than living stork species.

Palaeontologist Hanneke Meijer of the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden, the Netherlands, made the discovery with colleague Dr Rokus Due of the National Center for Archaeology in Jakarta, Indonesia.

They found fossilised fragments of four leg bones in the Liang Bua caves on the island of Flores.

The bones, thought to be belong to a single stork, are between 20,000 to 50,000 years old, having been found in sediments dating to that age.

“I noticed the giant stork bones for the first time in Jakarta, as they stood out from the rest of the smaller bird bones. Finding large birds of prey is common on islands, but I wasn’t expecting to find a giant marabou stork,” Dr Meijer told the BBC.

No wing bones were found, but the researchers suspect the giant stork rarely, if at all, took flight.

Instead, the size and weight of its leg bones, and the thickness of the bone walls, suggest that the now extinct stork was so heavy that it lived most of its life on the ground.

It is thought to have evolved from flying storks that colonised the relatively isolated island.

“Flores has never been connected to mainland Asia and has always been isolated from surrounding islands. This isolation has played a key role in shaping the evolution of the Flores fauna,” says Dr Meijer.

Many species on the islands evolved into either giants or dwarfs.

This phenomenon is known as the ‘island factor’, and is thought to have been triggered by few mammalian predators being on the island. That led to abundant prey species becoming smaller, and other predators becoming larger.

“Larger mammals, such as elephants and primates, show a distinct decrease in size, whereas the smaller mammals such as rodents, and birds, have increased in size,” explains Dr Meijer.

Among the giants evolved the giant stork, and the giant rat, Papagomys armandvillei, as well as Komodo dragons, the largest surviving species of lizard.

Dwarf species included the dwarfed elephant, Stegodon florensis insularis, and the human species , popularly known as the ‘hobbit’ H. floresiensis.

Indeed, the remains of the giant stork were found in the same section of cave as the remains of H. floresiensis.

Discovered in 2004, H. floresiensis is thought to be a new human-like species standing just 1m tall, which survived until 12,000 to 8,000 years ago.

It is thought to be descended from a prehistoric species of human – perhaps H. erectus – which reached island South-East Asia more than a million years ago.

“The status of this human contemporary has been subject of intense debate since its discovery,” says Dr Meijer. “But in my opinion, the associated fauna is crucial in understanding the evolution of H. floresiensis.”